My Journey from IE6 to IE7 to IE6

Ok for those geeks in the audience here's my take on IE7 that was released about a week ago. I eagerly downloaded and installed it hoping to finally have some of my favorite Firefox features in my work browser. My first impression was that the installer was a much smaller download than normal for an Internet Explorer point release. The install was smooth and as part of it they required that I install all outstanding security patches (kudos to Microsoft on this).

My initial experience with the browser itself was "Hey this is Firefox with Microsoft logos", but unfortunately my elation was soon brought back to reality. The UI is very minimalist which gives more room for viewing pages, but at first is difficult to find common functions. For example the traditional placement of the back, forward, stop and refresh buttons in close proximity has been replaced with having forward and back one place and the other two elsewhere. I also searched high and low and never did quite find the browse history.

Rendering was where IE7 really started showing its true stripes. First I tried pointing it to my Parish website and was thankful for it being able to render my positioning correctly, but some rollovers that work fine in Firefox and in IE6 no longer functioned. My next big test was to use the browser on a day to day basis for work. I quickly found out that several bits of normal functionality in my Altiris Helpdesk were no longer functioning with IE7 deciding JavaScript that has worked in IE6 for years is suddenly not good enough to run. It was because of this that I decided to pull the plug and return to IE6. Thankfully Microsoft made this a very easy and painless uninstall back to IE6. For now I'm sticking with the time tested IE6 with all its bugs and hoping that IE7.01 comes soon... either that or Altiris will rewrite helpdesk to be usable with Firefox.